TV IMPACT ON KIDS RUNS GAMUT: GOOD TO AWFUL

It isn’t all bad TV.

Amid the gloomy themes that children’s television is a “disaster,” that much of Saturday-morning fare is nothing more than promotions of “He-Man” sorts of toys, that there are correlations between aggression on television and aggressive behavior, and that a lot of the nation’s youth spends more hours in front of the box than they do in school, a “Children and the Media” conference this week also took time out to show--and tell--the good stuff:

--Clips from NBC’s “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Silver Spoons,” treating the issue of child abuse and delivering the message about how important it is for the child to tell someone what’s going on.

--A one-hour ABC movie, “One Too Many” (airing May 21 at 8 p.m.), about drunk driving (the No. 1 killer of teen-agers) and its victims, which suggests that a true friend will take the car keys away from someone who’s had too much alcohol. “But he’ll hate my guts,” the male high school student says. “Yeah, he’ll hate your guts,” the counselor replies, “but he’ll still be alive.”

--A recent 15-minute segment from ABC’s “20/20” about the problems that Michael Lutkevich, age 2, of Medford, Mass., had in falling asleep and staying asleep packing in more humor than most sitcoms, and how a psychologist handled the problem.

In the midst of the segment, Elva Reid, a Pasadena nursery school director sitting in the front row of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, turned to a friend and sighed, “Isn’t TV wonderful?”

That, of course, was hardly the message of the three-day conference, whose subject matter was the impact of media for--and about --children. Not only television, but movies and the pervasively violent, sexually violent music videos too. Singer Donna Summer said she is concerned about her 12-year-old daughter seeing such images.

The conference dealt not only with so-called children’s programming and family-hour shows, but also with virtually everything under that vast television umbrella. After all, many adolescents--and children--have access to the set at all hours. Moreover, what would have been unacceptable fare three decades or more ago is now commonplace.

As Deborah Aal of the Leonard Goldberg Co., supervising producer of ABC’s 1984 Emmy-winning “Something About Amelia” (the two-hour movie about incest), noted: “There isn’t any childhood anymore, because of television. Television is the box that has taken away the secrets.”

Linda Otto of Alan Landsburg Productions, producer of NBC’s “Adam” (the story of Adam Walsh, a child who was abducted and murdered), agreed, saying that she’d rather have a child “a little scared” than hurt or kidnaped. “My feeling is that kids know about everything. . . . It’s not ‘Father Knows Best’ anymore.”

And actress Mariette Hartley, on the importance of dealing with painful issues: “The magnitude of child molestation, teen-age suicide . . . it’s as if we’ve looked under society’s skirts and find the petticoats are not particularly clean. And it’s up to us not to pull the skirts down, but to keep those skirts coming up and up and up, higher and higher. Doing ‘Silence of the Heart’ (in which she played the mother of a teen-ager who committed suicide) made me aware of the profound affect television can have. And for me, it was the best use. . . .”

“The Cosby Show” drew praise for being a sensitive, mature production about a family that happens to be black, while “The A-Team” and its star Mr. T were considered negative.

No one suggested that even good TV is a substitute for books, music or an hour of fun on the playground. But, as Dorothy Singer, co-director (with husband Jerome Singer) of Yale University’s Family Television Research and Consultation Center, noted, television is a fact of life that must be dealt with--and not through censorship or boycotts, but by parental monitoring and control of viewing time.

“We can’t throw out television,” Singer said. Instead, it can be used--as well as turned off, she and other experts pointed out.

Indeed, with a kind of “if-you-can’t-lick-’em . . . “ approach, the Singers, who are both psychology professors, are making use of videotape technology. With a $150,000 grant from ABC, they have developed a course for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders that’s now used in about 100 school districts across the nation.

Four of their eight tapes are “The Technical Side of TV” (how pictures are made and broadcast ), “The Magic of TV” (how special effects, dissolves and slow motion are created; how you distinguish between fantasy and reality on TV), “Action and Violence” (the difference between fantasy action and the real-life action of news and sports; how TV violence is staged and why it’s dangerous to imitate it) and “Commercials” (why commercials are made and how they influence us; how we can become more discriminating consumers).

So engaging were the tapes--each about 10 minutes and designed to promote classroom discussion--that instead of seeing just one sample and talking about it, Singer’s audience insisted on viewing, and evaluating, three more.

Singer noted that when the tapes were tried out in Connecticut schools in the late ‘70s, “The Incredible Hulk” had been in its full flush of popularity. In one third-grade classroom, pupils had been asked to list their favorite television characters and tell why they liked them. Inevitably, the Hulk won, hands down. One child said he liked the Hulk’s strength but didn’t like it when he went “out of control.” The teacher later told Singer that that was the first time that child had ever spoken up in class, and she felt that now he would continue to do so.

The “international” conference--for entertainment executives and personalities as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, parent leaders and just plain parents who had read about it or heard of it on TV--also included a panel of five articulate 17-year-olds from L.A.-area high schools.

They gave their impressions of a dozen relatively current movies they’d seen--the good, the bad and the awful. (Later, someone suggested that the panel was too articulate, that it would have been interesting to hear from those whose preferences run to the likes of “Friday the 13th.”)

Director Peter Bogdanovich, who co-led the panel, said the legitimization of pornography led to the decline of female movie stars. “Marilyn Monroe was the end of it,” he said, adding that too often women are portrayed as “victims,” even in subtle ways, as in Shirley MacLaine’s character in “Terms of Endearment,” where she was “constantly being set up. In the book she had been strong, but all the jokes were at her expense” in the film.

Of course that sort of refinement had nothing to do with the sledgehammer approach of the slash-and-gore movies--and the ads that hype them--that Neil Malamuth, UCLA’s chairman of communications studies, talked about. One such ad: “See bloodthirsty butchers, killer-drillers . . . slash, strangle, mangle and mutilate bare-breasted beauties in bondage.”

During a panel on music videos, Singer noted that in the last two months she had seen 166 music videos on a variety of channels and found 60% to be violent. “I don’t think there is one video showing a woman who works hard for a living,” she said.

Carol Rosenstein, president of Together Again Productions, which makes music videos, suggested that parents--and teen-agers too--write directly to artists whose videos they find offensive.

And Summer, whose own videos have been praised by such watchdog organizations as the National Council on Television Violence, said some producers “care only about your money and not about your children-- our children.”